Barometric Pressure

Across the lake the

hillside blurs: houses,

the vineyard, ten thousand

trees grow gray and

indistinct beneath

dark gray.

The chair, the novel, the

drying trunks I shelter before

returning to the dock to

extend my arms and

feel it come. It will mist

me with the wind, or it will

batter and punish my skin, or

some hundred or thousand

droplets among the septillion

will fall upon my arms and slide,

gently, along follicles and

fissures too small for me to know

so that then I can feel what I am.

A gull cries. I wait for God, for

the sky.